Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying 'victim,' especially when you're not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you're not one.

Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

I don't think that we really know a whole lot about Barack Obama at all that you would really call distinctive.

No longer can we measure compassion by how much we spend on poverty but how many people we help to lift out of poverty.

The black conservative is responsible for making people question an idea that racism must be extinct before black people can overcome. Understanding that our goal is to thrive despite racism rather than fetishizing it is, in fact, the central ideological plank of people deemed "black conservatives." This is a coherent position, but that can be hard to perceive, given the way that race has been discussed in our land over the past 40 years or so.

If you took away the color of Barack Obama's skin, nobody right now would be paying him any attention.

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.